I've always been intrigued by game design in general and MMORPGs in particular especially after being exposed to EverQuest and how much that game brought to the table in terms of creativity and innovation at the time. However, there are always nay-sayers who will haunt me every time I try to express how certain game design philosophies or game mechanics are fun and engaging if done right.
Allow me to make this easy to read and try to bust all of these Myths one at a time.
Myth 1: People will not tolerate a game without Inta-Travel
This one mostly comes from people who suffer from tunnel vision having in mind an MMORPG that plays like your average modern MMO with those Solo-Questing-On-Rail kind of approach where you're always asked to go to several places and they're never your choice, I call them World of Runcrafts because you spent most of your time running from an "Objective" to another. Which is almost every MMO I've played since 2004. In that kind of design philosophy "No Insta Travel" might not probably work.
In reality, I've recently played Black Desert Online for months non-stop and surprisingly I've NEVER, EVER, heard anyone on Reddit, In Game or on the Official Forums EVER complain about the lack of insta-traveling. Black Desert Online has ZERO teleportation/inta-travel. The only means of travel there is either on a mount or running and the world is not small. Can you imagine not hearing ANYONE EVER complaining about the lack of insta-travel? People in Black Desert Online usually complain about RNG, Cheating, Cash Shops..etc but no one ever said "Oh boy I wish I can insta travel to Valencia."
In other words; developers/designers don't need to yield to the nay-sayer because they don't know crap what they're saying. BDO is a real examples that people would not mind running around to their destinations because in that kind of game designs people choose to travel and they're not forced to do stupid redundant errands which requires a lot of passive "running" time which warrant to create arbitrary solutions, a.k.a insta-travel.
Saying this, I think giving certain classes the ability to reduce the traveling time (like Teleportation / Buffs / Other creative means) is a plus and I'm all for it keeping in mind these "social skills" should not be gained easily (requires weeks of leveling up). Never give such privilage away easily. I also want to reanact the epic-ness of the journey to meet my friends who all started on the other side of a different continent.
Myth 2: We're not college students anymore; no one got time for six hours dungeon
When I used to play EQ back in 1999/200x yes I was a college student but I used to play with family members and friends who had full time jobs and family to take care of. Those people played a lot more than I did. The reason why people don't play games as much as we used to is because modern games are watered down and are completely dull. There's no "chase" anymore because every reward is thrown at you left an right you even sometimes wonder "what's the point of this again?". In EQ we had dreams, we had goals.. things took TIME to do whether it's a level or some FREAKING HARD TO ATTAIN item like the Epic Quest / Journeymans Boots...etc. We used to camp places only because we CHOSE to camp/grind those places, we did things our own pace. We wanted more challenge? We delved deeper, we got bored of this place we moved to another. We wanted to stop, we just simple stop there's no linear-conitinuous content (like a McDungeon-on-rail where you have to finish it all to "complete it"). We were free to do anythign we wanted and there are several hard-to-achieve goals. That Chase keeps us coming and committing to our characters, that kind of investment made us play those 6+ hours without noticing the time. Yes, some people might not have that kind of time but the same was true in EQ. I sometimes couldn't commit over 2 hours a day when I played EQ at a certain point, that didn't prevent me from enjoying the game.
My friends and I jumped to Project 1999 and boy was it easy to, again, grind for hours and hours wihtout feeling time passing. Why is that you wonder? It is the combination of tens or hundreds of game mechanics and philosophy all banned together to create THAT experience, if you start to compromise with those game philosophies you'll end up with a different kind of Dish.
Myth 3: Corpse Runs are a thing of the past and will make you lose subscribers if you implement it
All what I have to say is; Dark Souls says Hi and it Begs to Differ. People love a chellenging and harsh game design. It actuallys makes people more persistant and wants to go back despite their frustration if done right. Corpse Runs are not a only a death penalty, Corpse Runs are a difficulty threshold. It is like playing XCOM in Ironman mode, make one mistake and it's game over for you. It's the kind of commitment and trust you make with your friends/group and a reminder that this world is dangerous. Without corpse runs, there's no fear at all except for losing some XP (or god forbid only some coins). What's the point of being in a world if traversing it is so trivial. The only thing that made my heart race when I was in Kithicor Forest was Corpse Run. I literally was SWEATING running away from, what I assumed, an undead of some sort. I almost crapped my pants running for my life to safety. How can you reanact that without such a penalty? I've tried games with many types of death penalties and nothing comes even close to losing your corpse in the middle of a dungeon. It actually makes skills like Evacuation meaningful. It makes skills like Summon Corpse valid. Again, I'm all for the community solving their hinderance and problems that are thrown at them by the game. Corpse Runs are important and I hope VR don't yield to the nay-sayers. If you want to bring back that kind of EQ epic experience, you won't even achieve have of that without Corpse Runs. And like I said, people love challenge... players don't enjoy a harsh environment. We've been told to believe how the average gamer is incapable of taking such a punishing game mechanic but you'd be surprised how wrong you are. Of course there are people who would disagree, heck there are millions of people who enjoy those insta-gratitude kind of games but those people are not your target audience.
I'm tired of having to yield to all those pussies who wants to play easy games, I'm tired of it. I'll tell you what, let's try Corpse Runs in Alpha and Beta and see how things will go. But please don't scrap the concept from the game. It is crucial for such a game. People will probably praise Pantheon for being that HARSH game and some people will be attracted to this kind of approach, it might be the label of the game "Hey, did you try that masochistic game? It's freaking tough. We need someone good to help us clear Dungeon X and you're a decent MMO player.. why don't you give it a try?" and I say it again.. People love challenges.
And that's it for now, I'll be moving along!
Laura said:I'm tired of having to yield to all those pussies who wants to play easy games, I'm tired of it.
I agree with everything except this line. This line alone kills any real message you are trying to send in my opinion. It closes the door for any type of discussion.
Corpse Runs are a dilemma .
What you say is right and I also remember a particular corpse run of my Ranger in Kithicor . Well, he died AGAIN and it couldn't have been avoided - an undead casting root , stop, end . So now I have 2 corpses ...
Another case I remember was a Fear wipe . It was midnight and the recovery was expected around 2 a.m . So I had to go to bed . I couldn't get back in the next days and ... the level 50 character raid equipment poofed .
Well there is a significant fraction of players for whom enough is enough and an unsub follows .
That's why I would say that this particular decision REALLY depends on the player basis and can only be rationally decided by voting (f.ex during beta) . If the player basis is around 50/50 then the safer way to go is to eliminate corpse runs . Should it be 90/10 in favour of corpse runs then corpse runs are fine .
Personnaly I vote no corpse runs as unique way to recover equipment after death . I can live with corpse runs to recover XP but NOT equipment .
It does, but i wanted to refresh your memory.
We had instant portals, your forgetting the planes, the wizard spires, and the druid rings.
The only thing we did not have at the start was a mount system. Yes one could argue, we did have a mount system, that was a druid, ranger, shaman (Sow), wiz, and then we have the levi classes. :)
but you are forgetting we did have ports, just not as many as they have in EQ now, or cut down, dry as in other games.
We are not in college, actually i was much older in my 20's then most that started EQ in alpha, beta. I still loved to work at EQ all the time, but it took us away from so many social events in life to complete all of those 72 hr camps.
Rinse and repeat to grind out is one thing but after awhile it gets you down. A few dedicated alpha, beta testers will be around when 5-6 years comes and goes but everyone goes through a retirement package stage. Casual becomes a need after awhile.
POP grinding was awesome, yet we lost a crap load of people around pop because they could not keep up with the constant flagging of zones... basically keys to get in.
This game should not cater to a 10 year old, but mostly 20's crowd and beyond. I am not sure but i started when brad started, we maybe the same age now.
I loved, and hated the hardcore stuff of EQ, but one game will never matchup and that was lineage 2, i hated the grind, i hated it completely.. WOW was a nice break from EQ, 1-50ish era.
It will just require the devs to balance what we know, and what they know worked in all of the games we played and match them to our needs.... but i hope it never gets as easy as WOW and EQ2 was like.
I agree with most of what Laura said, but I feel like the developers know these things, and we're going to end up getting what we want. The people who are asking for their class to be able to dps, heal, tank, CC, and buff mana regen do not seem to have their finger on the pulse of this game. Same thing with the people who are asking for WoW-ride linear dungeons, freaking out about painful/meaningful death, and asking for spammy rotation combat. I don't think their posts are worth getting upset over. It will all work out.
Deadshade, that sucks that you lost everything in Fear, man, but that was a rare thing. I would say your case is the exception. It's not like you had people constantly losing 200 real life days worth of equipment because of an unfortunately timed wipe. In most of those situations, people were willing to help. Sure, you might have needed to give up some sleep, but the majority of the time, you would get your corpse.
I'm definitely in favor of corpse runs. I want my heart to race when I'm running through an area I have no business being in. You just don't get that when it doesn't matter. I actually ended up in my first guild because I lost my corpse in Kithicor. I never got to see Kithicor before the undead. When I came into the game in the fall of 1999, the undead took the zone over every night. People would actually sit at the zone lines and wait for the sun to come up in the game before trying to run through (This doesn't happen on the TLPs. Why? Because death is less scary and meaningful there. Why wait? Just take your chances. No big deal if you die, anyway. You just try again). Anyway, I didn't know anything about the zone. I was a young ranger, and someone told me there were ranger quest NPCs in cabins in the woods. I was running around and looking for them when night fell, and I got rocked by a bunch of higher level undead. I didn't check my /loc before I died, because newb, and had no idea where the corpse was. A level 50 druid named Elvia saw me running around there naked and offered to help. She called a level 50 bard from her guild, Yedo, and he ran over and got my corpse back. I ended up joining that guild when I leveled up. It's funny how I remember so many names from EverQuest...and it's not just the names. I still remember what the characters looked like. I spent 2-3 times as many years playing WoW and I don't think I remember even a fraction of what I remember from EQ...and WoW was much more recent! That story is from literally 17 years ago. Anyway, there was probably a better place to talk about death penalties, but I thought I'd put that story in here.
Maximis said:Laura said:I'm tired of having to yield to all those pussies who wants to play easy games, I'm tired of it.
I agree with everything except this line. This line alone kills any real message you are trying to send in my opinion. It closes the door for any type of discussion.
Yes, was a great post, but let's try to avoid pejoratives. Plus, it's Christmas time! :)
I just look at it this way -- there are plenty of MMOs out there on the easy side, plenty of options. It's true that some who play those games complain that Pantheon isn't the same way too, coming across 'entitled', and it can get annoying. That's why I wrote https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/blogs/151/175/how-to-respond-to-skeptics
There real question is how do these features or lack of benefit the game. The lack instant travel can certainly encourage exploration and slowing the pace, but when someone is trying to get back to the raid it serves only to hinder progression when one or more players have to spend 10 or even 30 mins getting back.So having some form, even if its a class based spell needs to exist.
Number two is irrelevant to me since I don’t feel games should be catered to people who don’t have time to play, thats like going to a 2 hour movie and compiling you only got 30 mins to watch.
Number there serves to caution players by giving death some meaning, but this has to be handled with finesse. Some games have problems with pvp campers, or even NPC mobs stacked on the corpse since they don't have a ghost form or the ability to move corpse. That serves only to frustrate players.
HemlockReaper said:There real question is how do these features or lack of benefit the game. The lack instant travel can certainly encourage exploration and slowing the pace, but when someone is trying to get back to the raid it serves only to hinder progression when one or more players have to spend 10 or even 30 mins getting back.So having some form, even if its a class based spell needs to exist.
Number two is irrelevant to me since I don’t feel games should be catered to people who don’t have time to play, thats like going to a 2 hour movie and compiling you only got 30 mins to watch.
Number there serves to caution players by giving death some meaning, but this has to be handled with finesse. Some games have problems with pvp campers, or even NPC mobs stacked on the corpse since they don't have a ghost form or the ability to move corpse. That serves only to frustrate players.
There will be teleportation class spells -- we've not gone into details yet on their limitations (other than to say there will be limitations). In your scenario I would assume you would be bound near the entrance of the dungeon, re-enter the dungeon, and then have your group Call of Hero back to them -- or, better yet, just Rez your corpse.
PvP campers will only be on PvP shards.
Targeting your corpse and /dragging it will not be a problem (or /consenting another player to /drag), even if there are NPCs stacked on top.
Aradune said:There will be teleportation class spells -- we've not gone into details yet on their limitations (other than to say there will be limitations). In your scenario I would assume you would be bound near the entrance of the dungeon, re-enter the dungeon, and then have your group Call of Hero back to them -- or, better yet, just Rez your corpse.
PvP campers will only be on PvP shards.
Targeting your corpse and /dragging it will not be a problem (or /consenting another player to /drag), even if there are NPCs stacked on top.
This part is the key to corpse runs. They work great as long as their is enough time and support allowed.
Allowing others to drag your corpse is great. Also, allowing some classes to find your corpse is Even more important. I have ran through the dark panicking in an unfamiliar place and had no idea where my corpse was.
Aradune said:HemlockReaper said:There real question is how do these features or lack of benefit the game. The lack instant travel can certainly encourage exploration and slowing the pace, but when someone is trying to get back to the raid it serves only to hinder progression when one or more players have to spend 10 or even 30 mins getting back.So having some form, even if its a class based spell needs to exist.
Number two is irrelevant to me since I don’t feel games should be catered to people who don’t have time to play, thats like going to a 2 hour movie and compiling you only got 30 mins to watch.
Number there serves to caution players by giving death some meaning, but this has to be handled with finesse. Some games have problems with pvp campers, or even NPC mobs stacked on the corpse since they don't have a ghost form or the ability to move corpse. That serves only to frustrate players.
There will be teleportation class spells -- we've not gone into details yet on their limitations (other than to say there will be limitations). In your scenario I would assume you would be bound near the entrance of the dungeon, re-enter the dungeon, and then have your group Call of Hero back to them -- or, better yet, just Rez your corpse.
PvP campers will only be on PvP shards.
Targeting your corpse and /dragging it will not be a problem (or /consenting another player to /drag), even if there are NPCs stacked on top.
Ahh man, this brings back so many fond memories:
(Some level 20) Hey, I died real deep in this dungeon, can you go get my corpse?
(Me, lvl 50) Sure! Consent me.(Proceed to drag it even deeper)
Ahh, the good old days. I did lose my first characters body down the Befallen Well. Wizards sucked anyway. Made an enchanter instead and enjoyed insta groups everytime I logged in...
Laura said:
Yes, some people might not have that kind of time but the same was true in EQ. I sometimes couldn't commit over 2 hours a day when I played EQ at a certain point, that didn't prevent me from enjoying the game.
What about instant-instant by Death Warping in Everquest? Toss everything into the bank, get yourself killed and you appear where you bound yourself? No corpse run and instant-travel. You also have various escape and evac spells that can get you across a zone instantly.
Lovecraft said:What about instant-instant by Death Warping in Everquest? Toss everything into the bank, get yourself killed and you appear where you bound yourself? No corpse run and instant-travel. You also have various escape and evac spells that can get you across a zone instantly.
Are you making a point for not having universal banking?
I thought I read somewhere that they weren't going to have magical banks and were instead going to have like pack mules for everyone?
EDIT: Though I suppose the pack mules would basically just be an easier universal bank anyway, so whatever.
Shucklighter said:I thought I read somewhere that they weren't going to have magical banks and were instead going to have like pack mules for everyone?
EDIT: Though I suppose the pack mules would basically just be an easier universal bank anyway, so whatever.
Banks will most likely be local, not global.
Aradune said:Shucklighter said:I thought I read somewhere that they weren't going to have magical banks and were instead going to have like pack mules for everyone?
EDIT: Though I suppose the pack mules would basically just be an easier universal bank anyway, so whatever.
Banks will most likely be local, not global.
Interesting. I will have to decide where to keep each characters items.
Shucklighter said:
Deadshade, that sucks that you lost everything in Fear, man, but that was a rare thing. I would say your case is the exception. It's not like you had people constantly losing 200 real life days worth of equipment because of an unfortunately timed wipe. In most of those situations, people were willing to help.
Well it was not a SO rare thing in my particular population . At start in 99 there were only US servers . So we, Europeans, played on US servers and in US (majority) Guilds .
See the problem ? A raid starting at 5 p.m EST it's 11 p.m here . So clearly if something goes wrong and God knows that Fear went often wrong, the Euros are f....d because they will never have the time to stay long enough for a rebreak and CR . And if there is anything that prevents one to log in the next day and/or noone is raiding Fear, your corpse goes to hell .
I have seen that many times - sometimes the people were so angry that they unsubbed and sometimes they just grinded many days for new equipment . I belonged to the latter category but I swear that I'd have unsubbed too if the same gag happened to me a second time .
That's why if there was a poll, I'd definitely vote AGAINST a possibility to loose equipment if the corpse was not recovered within X hours or Y days . Everyting else is fair game but not equipment .
Deadshade said:Shucklighter said:
Deadshade, that sucks that you lost everything in Fear, man, but that was a rare thing. I would say your case is the exception. It's not like you had people constantly losing 200 real life days worth of equipment because of an unfortunately timed wipe. In most of those situations, people were willing to help.
Well it was not a SO rare thing in my particular population . At start in 99 there were only US servers . So we, Europeans, played on US servers and in US (majority) Guilds .
See the problem ? A raid starting at 5 p.m EST it's 11 p.m here . So clearly if something goes wrong and God knows that Fear went often wrong, the Euros are f....d because they will never have the time to stay long enough for a rebreak and CR . And if there is anything that prevents one to log in the next day and/or noone is raiding Fear, your corpse goes to hell .
I have seen that many times - sometimes the people were so angry that they unsubbed and sometimes they just grinded many days for new equipment . I belonged to the latter category but I swear that I'd have unsubbed too if the same gag happened to me a second time .
That's why if there was a poll, I'd definitely vote AGAINST a possibility to loose equipment if the corpse was not recovered within X hours or Y days . Everyting else is fair game but not equipment .
As Brad has stated before, with the modern cloud structure, latency is not a serious issue anymore. Plus, they can put servers almost anywhere with the cloud. That should relieve some issues.
But, overall, it might have been more of a symptom of your raid force. I, for one, would not be a part of a raid force that that thinks its acceptable to let a raid member lose all their gear and go to bed, unless the raid member was a moron and intentionally or negligently causing the repeated situation. Then, it would not matter because they would never raid with us again anyways.
But, if you know that corpse runs will be a problem in a specific raid, the force should plan for that time as part of the regularly scheduled time slot. If not, they should stay and help the team recover their gear, even past hours.
You don't leave a man behind.
Also, if equipment is not lost, but other thing are, why even bring the other things? You could just avoid the penalty by not bringing those items with you.
A better method would allow you to release your corpse out of the raid zone, such as to the zone line. That would make it easier to retrieve your corpse/gear when the raid is done, but still make it hard to get your corpse during the raid.
Ah, okay. I can see how raiding from other time zones would complicate things. I was in a European guild for a while because they had two raid times that were afternoon and evening for me, but I wasn't really doing much of anything else back then. Still, that's all part of it. Maybe you respect the content enough and fear the consequences of failure enough that you have to seriously consider whether or not you want to raid that late. I'm not against corpse summoning spells (limited to one or two classes) with expensive reagents for extreme circumstances like that.
EDIT: Typo
I was understanding there would be no gear loss. As a compromise I think I would like to see the time allowed to retrieve the corpse extended to a 5 to 7 days, and the gear left on the corpse. At the end of the extended time limit, the corpse with the gear less experance would be relocated to a safe place to recover the items.
You could corpse run for it and retreave the gear immediately, or wait until the timer and get your gear.
Deadshade said:What you say is right and I also remember a particular corpse run of my Ranger in Kithicor . Well, he died AGAIN and it couldn't have been avoided - an undead casting root , stop, end . So now I have 2 corpses ...
Well.... yes it could have. Wait till daytime when the undead are gone before you enter Kithicor and you wont get ganked by the nasty nighttime critters. Or wait till daytime to get your corpse. Or get a friend (or friends) to go with you on the corpse run.
It is exactly this kind of player knowledge that has real meaning and direct impact to your level of success that most (all?) modern MMOs lack.
Deadshade said:Well it was not a SO rare thing in my particular population . At start in 99 there were only US servers . So we, Europeans, played on US servers and in US (majority) Guilds .
See the problem ? A raid starting at 5 p.m EST it's 11 p.m here . So clearly if something goes wrong and God knows that Fear went often wrong, the Euros are f....d because they will never have the time to stay long enough for a rebreak and CR . And if there is anything that prevents one to log in the next day and/or noone is raiding Fear, your corpse goes to hell .
I have seen that many times - sometimes the people were so angry that they unsubbed and sometimes they just grinded many days for new equipment . I belonged to the latter category but I swear that I'd have unsubbed too if the same gag happened to me a second time .
That's why if there was a poll, I'd definitely vote AGAINST a possibility to loose equipment if the corpse was not recovered within X hours or Y days . Everyting else is fair game but not equipment .
Well, I hate to say it but if you werent able to commit to both the raid and the known possible consequences, you shouldnt have gone on the raid. Particuarly if you couldnt play for days after it when you might have been able to follow another guild in later.
I know that sounds really really harsh, and it's hard to hear that some content is just not within your reach. But you'll be in exactly the same boat as me. I'm a father, business owner, plus have a full time career job, and absolutely can't risk the hits to wife faction. I will never see a raid. And that's ok. The knowledge that there are bigger things in the game world than me gives me a sense of awe in the game world that is difficult to replace. Unlike the knowledge that if you keep following the quest breadcrumb trail then you'll have "done that" eventually, or worse, just throw yourself at a raid a few dozen times and fail without any real consequences at all. There's no fear in that. There's no risk. There's only an investment of time, and that's not good enough for me or most of the people here so desperate to go back to old school mechanics.
Everyone knows that a 1999 level of risk isnt going to be for every gamer. Everyone knows that the real risk of losing something permanently is a completely foreign concept to WoW-level gamers, many of which simply will not except. But there's also an army of people that love perma-death and honestly there's a growing popularity in survival games that are brutaly harsh.
As a side-note: I keep hearing people reference PoP-era and later EQ, and saying things like "Well even EQ had XYZ.". No, sorry. PoP-era EQ and later doesnt qualify as old-school EQ. Sony bastardized the game increasingly over time and most real EQ fans from it's release will say that this era is when EQ really started to sink into the swamp and started the downward spiraling trend toward gumball machine instant-gratification that ruin so many of the intangible things that made earlier EQ so compelling.